Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Detectives for the Chicago Police Department in consultation with the FBI have begun a review of more than 50 unsolved strangulations of women -- many with histories of prostitution and illegal drug use -- looking for evidence of serial murder. Superintendent Eddie Johnson ordered the probe in hopes that recovered DNA can help identify their killer or killers.

"We are looking at them now to see if we can go back and do some additional testing to ... bring to the forefront who these (offending) individuals are," Johnson said.

Chicago-based members of the Illinois State Senate are also reviewing the homicides. The lawmakers conducted a hearing called by Sen. Patricia Van Pelt to probe whether police investigations have been hampered by a backlog of DNA evidence from more than 5,000 crimes, including 658 homicides, awaiting testing by overburdened Illinois State Crime Labs.

For two years, the Murder Accountability Project has warned that too many strangulation and asphyxiation murders of women have gone unsolved, a pattern suggestive of serial murder. "It's highly unlikely these 50 women were murdered by 50 separate men," said MAP Chairman Thomas Hargrove.

Reporter Pam Zekman of CBS affiliated station WBBM-TV has also reviewed the murders and issued four reports outlining the killings and the Chicago community's growing response to them. Chicago detectives, once dismissive of MAP's concerns, recently agreed that "any reasonable person" would conclude the strangulation and asphyxiation deaths may be linked to a common killer or killers.

To see a map showing the victim's names, body-recovery locations and details of these crimes, click here.To download a copy of MAP's seven-page analysis of the Chicago strangulations given to the Chicago City Council and Police Superintendent Johnson, click here.

Thursday, March 14, 2019

Law enforcement agencies failed to notify the FBI about nearly
half of homicides of American Indians and Alaskan Natives committed from 1999
to 2017, according to a study by the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project
(MAP).

The study found Indian murders are the least likely of any
racial group to be reported to the federal Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) which
is part of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the nation’s official accounting for
major crimes. These records are valuable to local, state and federal
authorities for identifying and responding to challenges facing law
enforcement.

At least 2,406 Indian and Native murders have not been reported to federal authorities. This finding is based on MAP’s comparison of homicides
reported by medical authorities to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) and homicides reported by police to the Supplementary Homicide
Report.

MAP representatives met with U.S. Assistant Secretary for Indian
Affairs Tara Sweeney and other Interior Department leaders on February 4 to
discuss these reporting failures.MAP’s
study resulted from a request by Interior officials who also sought a briefing
on the findings. Interior officials declined to comment publicly on the
findings of this report.

The study found reporting of Indian murders has improved in recent years, especially since 2015 when several tribes like the Navajo Tribal Police began reporting homicides to the FBI for the first time. Reporting rates also vary by state, with the largest number of unreported homicides occurring in Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma. To download the eight-page MAP report on these reporting failures, click here.

Monday, February 18, 2019

Declining homicide clearance rates for African-American
victims accounted for all of the nation’s alarming decline in law enforcement’s
ability to clear murders through the arrest of criminal offenders, according to a new study of data compiled by the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project (MAP).

Reported clearance rates for the other three
races counted in the Supplementary Homicide Report – whites (which includes ethnic Hispanics), Asians and Native Americans – actually improved slightly over
the period from 1976 through 2017.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal
Justice Information Services Division in Clarksburg, West Virginia, has
estimated the nation’s homicide clearance rate for many years and found up to 90 percent of murders were cleared through the arrest of offenders in the mid 1960s, a rate that steadily declined until reaching 61 percent in 2017.
This decline in clearance rates has been widely observed for many years.But the Murder Accountability Project's study found declining clearance rates exclusively occurred among homicides of black victims based upon offender-identification data found in the Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) from 1976 through 2017. Clearance rates for all other races improved.This racial divide occurred in every region of the nation and in most communities, regardless of size. Major urban centers, suburban neighborhoods, rural counties and tiny cities all generally experienced a large decline in the rate at which black homicides are solved through arrest.Click here to download MAP's six-page report on this trend. The Murder Accountability Project's augmented SHR data, which includes more than 27,000 homicide cases not reported to the FBI, can be downloaded at no cost at the "Data & Docs" tab at this website.